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I have WebsitePros as my provider. I have gotten contacted by Webimage to do my site page over. They told me that I am paying for a template Webpage and for a few dollars more they will re-do and manage and promote my website. I am new to all of this, however, not happy that I have not had one sale in the 4 months of service. I have talked to them about my visitors and not one sale. Yes it is possible that my product is of no interest, however, why are they taking my money if in fact they already know this? By the messages posted others are not too happy with them either.

These guys are great, I host my animeball.com website there and I got a question answered within 12 hours, not only did they resolve the issue but also told me a danger about my site that I wasn't even aware of!

Ive had experience with the re-seller plans from www.HostNetworks.com.au an Australian based web host. I prefer web hosting companys to ones that do web development as well as they pretty much have a conflict of interest.

Not sure if anyone has had dealings with hostnetworks and has any opinions?

They have all the usual stuff Cpanel, php, mysql, phpmyadmin and the rest. The prices are in australian dollars I think they are fairly competative. I like them because they are so professional, everything is fast and capable. There are never any problems and the 24/7 support is actually very good.

it depends on what you are looking for....personal support or 24 hour support.... I would stay away from real big companies..... many seem to have problems with overloading their servers..... Yahoo has real bad reviews.

I'm starting to look for a host, but that's all I want, just a host. A machine with an OS (preferably Suse) that's maintained for me and doesn't have loads of woefully out of date crap installed on it like PHP 1.1 beta or that clunky and obstructive cPanel rubbish.

Pretty much just an ssh login, wget (so I can download up to date source of Apache, PHP, MySQL, OpenSSL etc. etc.), GNU tar and gzip etc (so I can unpack them), and obviously a compiler and make.

I wanna be able to get on with what I wanna do without having to wait ages for the software to get updated to what will be an out of date version by then anyway and not have to waste time trying to make sense of the freakish nonsense that crap like cPanel brings about (PHP MyAdmin for that matter too).

I just want a host I am in control of and lets me do what I want to do, rather just having to make do with what I'm forced to use.

Anyone got any suggestions? Is there any particular "type" of hosting I should be looking for? I tried Google but it just kept coming up with all the usual one size fits all crap.

Sounds like you need an unmanaged dedicated server, and they cost. Any shared hosting will come with a webserver installed, because it will be 1 webserver for several people, if everyone were to install their own webserver then the machine would simply run out of resources very quickly.

Also, if they were to let users install their own stuff, there would more than likely be several botched installs that work, but drain memory or CPU cycles into a black hole.

It's just not practical to give shared users free reign over a server like that. With a dedicated server though, you'd be free to knock yourself out, if you have a bad install of Apache, the only person it affects then is you, rather than however many users there are on the server.

When you say "they cost", what sort of level of "they cost" are we talking here?

I kinda figured it couldn't be shared hosting because two people on the same box trying to do the same thing just wouldn't make any sense. Though thinking about it, I guess that's why it'd cost more. Fewer people chipping cash in to the same machine, so one person would have to cover the cost of what everyone else would otherwise be paying right?

I still would want someone to cover security updates etc for the main OS though, you sure it'd be unmanaged?

An unmanaged server basically comes with an OS and you do the rest, a managed server comes with Apache, MySQL, PHP and all that jazz (which you don't want).

Dedicated servers will probably cost you at least a couple of hundred dollars per month, which is way off the chart. An alternative could be a VPS (virtual private server), basically it's 1 machine with the resources divided up among a number of users, however it's not like shared hosting because you can't exceed the resources you're allocated. VPS's are cheaper than dedicated servers, (though still quite expensive), and you won't get the same performance as a dedicated server (but it'll still be better than for shared hosting).

I think that beast is right here, you'd be better off upgrading your home connection to SDSL or something, it'd be cheaper than getting a dedicated server and you'd have complete control over the machine (not to mention a GUI).

Well part of the reason I want hosting is so I can shut my PC down once in a while.

I also want to use another domain name (my dootdootdoodydoodydootdoodoooo.com for general tinkery and another properly hosted one for public use) and I want to be able to use SSL/TLS on both domains (which is something you can't do on the same IP).

That vagusnet.com place that I used to be a part of used a VPS (I assume they still do) and that's where I found my disliking for them and cPanel. >.< Though I suppose it might not be so bad if I'm the only person using it. I can just get things done the way I'm used to without having to try and figure out how to make cPanel reflect everything I've done, so that when others that use cPanel come to do something, everything matches up.

It also had that WHM (Web Host Manager) for recompiling Apache and "Installing" SSL certificates and lots of other nonsense that would have taken 2 seconds to do the normal way, but ended up taking me days to do because of all its nonsense. That's the biggest driving force behind my desire for just a box on a big fat pipe, but I don't think I'll be paying for one of those any time soom. I guess the best I can do is just mail different providers asking if I can just ignore cPanel and WHM and do it the normal way with ssh.

Why not have a totally seperate server? I have a PC or laptop in every room and in the future if i have my own server im gonna stick it in the larder near the fridge so i wont ever hear it as its cool and dry in there but shut all my other computers down when not in use and have a small screen linked in the kitchen so i can update it from the breakfast bar when i need to. I agree with david and vice versa that it will be hard to find a server thats good enough though without spending a fortune every month. I had a look out of interest and some companies really do want hundreds! I nearly died of shock david but i suppose it would be expensive for companies to outlay that service.